How do I remove the backup files from my back up drive using Zorin 12.1?

I want to delete the files made by backups on my Zorin 9 laptop back up drive.

This is because I would like to use the Zorin 9 laptop back up drive to do an initial "backups" backup of my Zorin 12 laptop before I use Redo to take an image of my Zorin 12 machine and save it to my Zorin 12 laptop back up drive - just in case I **** up things.

I tried gksudo nautilus on my Zorin 12 machine and attempted to delete the backup files that I found on my Zorin 9 laptop back up drive. It seems like this is a no go - no sign of any activity - mind you, you can hardly tell with Zorin 12 if anything IS happening.

Will redo automatically overwrite what is on a backup disk that had been previous written to by backups?

Hi, I suspect it is a permissions issue - if you backed up your Zorin 9 as user on Zorin 9 that is most likely the issue - can't you delete your Zorin 9 backups from your Zorin 9 Notebook? Been a while since I played with redo but your best solution would be to download a live edition of GParted and format it with that?

That is correct, you boot off the live Redo backup CD - very clean interface and will backup your entire drive so if things do go wrong you can just put things back to where they were before the problem hit.

I think that it will be safest (in case I run out of space on my backup drive) to totally delete what has been created by backups (if that is possible - would a gksudo nautilus do the job?) and then use redo to completely capture where my laptop is up to.

I can try this first on my Zorin 9 laptop and then, if successful, my Zorin 12 laptop.

You don't need to gksudo nautilus unless permissions have been given to the external drive and/or you have formatted to ext4 - I tend to leave as NTFS and just backup my /home folder. If you are intending to wipe the backup drive entirely, just use a live edition of GParted and to avoid wiping the wrong drive disconnect any drive with a working OS on it.

I am considering an option which will mean that I can still use my backup drives to backup my data files in /home.

What I found when I used backups to restore things after a fresh install (using standard Zorin 9 and Zorin12 DVDs to install the O/S first to my laptops) I was surprised that all my specific Apps and settings were lost.

Perhaps, I was expecting too much from Backups.

What I now realise I want is a live DVD from which I can reinstall my O/S and apps the way I have got them and then use Backups to reinstall my specific data from my back up drives.

It seems as though this can be achieved by using pinguybuilder, running on my laptop, to create a .iso of my specific O/S, extra apps and settings, which can then be used to create a live DVD which, in turn, can be used to reinstall my specific O/S as required.

The only thing is that the .iso has to be less than 4 Gig it seems - will mine be larger as I have added apps and extras, I wonder?

Also, has anyone anyone any successful experience of pinguybuilder - I can raise a new topic on this if neccessary, as I am going a little off topic here.

Well a few years back I made a DVD iso of 32-bit ZorinOS 4 Core using Remastersys - sadly this project is now dead and last time I looked there was no GUI just command line, unlike Zorin 4 when it had a 'front-end' and worked really well - needless to say I had very little Data. Apparently there was a fork, Relinux, which is also dead but still available. The only other alternative is a paid for solution and not clear if that is dead now either!